Gary Morris founded Bright Lights Film Journal as a print publication in 1974; it became a web-only magazine in 1996. He is the author of the monograph Roger Corman (Twayne Publishers, 1985) and the editor of Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran (Anthem Press, 2009). Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
John Waters, Zsa Zsa Gabor, The Bad Seed, Supermarionation – the late Doris Fish trawled through the lowest depths of culture for her homemade camp fairy tale. Drag queen diva Doris Fish[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Barbara Hammer continues the groundbreaking investigations into gender that started with Nitrate Kisses – this time using autobiography to tell her truths. Barbara Hammer is best known for her groundbreaking[…]
Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
This grimy, exciting artifact from the ’60s shows how important beauty contests were to the queens who ruthlessly – and kind of sadly – mimicked their straight counterparts. The rank[…]
Documentaries · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
The U.S. must eventually come to its senses and leave this little island and its vital citizens alone. Americans’ view of Cuba is based more on the right wing’s mythmaking (a process[…]
Actors & Personalities · Pre-Code · Producers & Studios · Reviews
Nobody “did” the Depression, or sexual excess, or populist uprisings, better than the Brothers Warner. Conventional wisdom says that before the taboo-busting ’60s, all deviance in American filmmaking was suppressed.[…]
Harlow, Bankhead, yes, even patrician Norma Shearer “strayed” before the Hays Code ended their fun. Feminist film historians usually focus on Warners and RKO as the prime exponents of the “bad girl” genre[…]
Jackie’s almost eclipsed by the great Michelle Khan. Watch out for that building! Supercop is the second crucial step, after Rumble in the Bronx, in the repackaging of Asian superstar Jackie Chan for American[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · LGBT & Queer
The “world’s worst director” never apologized for wearing women’s clothes, though many have questioned his taste in sweaters. The story goes that Disney Studios threw Tim Burton a bone in[…]
Actors & Personalities · Silents
“Asta brings a subtle twist to her version of Hamlet not by playing a man, but by playing a woman disguised as a man, adding another level of gender complexity.”[…]
The 2014 release of James Franco’s Interior. Leather Bar. reminds us it’s time to revisit the still-notorious film that inspired it. * * * History shows us how easily yesterday’s[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
Stand back when ballooned-up, masacara-drenched go-go girls leave the confines of their cages for a murderous desert rampage! A cornerstone of both camp and punk cultures — no mean feat[…]
Actors & Personalities · Asian · Reviews
Jackie invades America for the second time. Is America finally ready? Jackie Chan’s “newest” film, Rumble in the Bronx, is only new to U.S. audiences. This film was released in 1994[…]
M-G-M’s nearly forgotten Queen of the Lot is enjoying a mini-revival America was built on a vague egalitarianism that scorned the worship of kings and queens, and no wonder —[…]
Actors & Personalities · Documentaries · Reviews
Literally burned by Preminger, driven crazy by an army of husbands, hangers-on, and J. Edgar Hoover, Jean Seberg lives on in a new documentary Jean Seberg was always more icon[…]
Queen alert! Seemingly respectable filmmakers are eagerly repackaging homosexuals as whining, pathetic drag queens for a culture disturbed by sex plagues and nose-ringed militants. If last year’s To Wong Foo led the charge, The Birdcage delivers[…]
With a head like a giant peanut, vast mascara’d eyes, too-kissable lips, baby-doll voice (courtesy of singer Mae Questel), flattened marcelled hair, and mere threads of a dress exposing miles[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Interviews
Behind that mountain of oversized tits-and-ass that make up his “body” of work is an extremely intelligent, charming, and funny man, well-versed in cinema history and pop culture. My first[…]
Actors & Personalities · Documentaries
There was more to Carmen Miranda than insane hats and leering grins, a recent documentary shows Camp depends on a glittering surface that often resists penetration. Carmen Miranda is one[…]
Actors & Personalities · Exploitation & Erotica · Interviews
“In the future, everybody will be so sexually satisfied, there’ll be an end to violence, rape and war. We will establish contact with extra-terrestrials and they will be very sexy.”[…]
A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960, by Jeanine Basinger, 1995, 528pp, paper, $17.95 (University Press of New England, 201 E. 50th St. New York, NY 10022). This is[…]
